posted at 8:36 am on July 3, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

Looks like the portents from ADP and Gallup were accurate. The BLS reports solid job growth in June of 288K, with the jobless rate decreasing to 6.1%. The number of jobs added in April and May were revised upward by 29,000 as well. However, the workforce participation rate remains at a 36-year low, while the number of involuntary part-time workers rose by 275,000:

Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 288,000 in June, and the unemployment rate declined to 6.1 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Job gains were widespread, led by employment growth in professional and business services, retail trade, food services and drinking places, and health care.

In June, the unemployment rate declined by 0.2 percentage point to 6.1 percent. The number of unemployed persons decreased by 325,000 to 9.5 million. Over the year, the unemployment rate and the number of unemployed persons have declined by 1.4 percentage points and 2.3 million, respectively. (See table A-1.) …

In June, the civilian labor force participation rate was 62.8 percent for the third consecutive month. The employment-population ratio, at 59.0 percent, showed little change over the month but is up by 0.3 percentage point over the year. (See table A-1.)

The number of persons employed part time for economic reasons (sometimes referred to as involuntary part-time workers) increased by 275,000 in June to 7.5 million. The number of involuntary part-time workers is down over the year but has shown no clear trend in recent months. These individuals were working part time because their hours had been cut back or because they were unable to find a full-time job. (See table A-8.)

ADP almost hit it right on the head yesterday with its estimate of 281,000. Private-sector employment rose by 262,000 in June. U-6, the more stable of the unemployment metrics, dropped a tenth of a point to 12.1%, its lowest level since the Great Recession and down from 12.7% in January. However, that’s still a long way off from the 8.2% of June 2007.

The number of people working part time for economic reasons rose as noted above, and now is at 7.544 million. A year ago, that seasonally-adjusted number was 8.194 million, and the trend has been going down during the recovery, if slowly. However, June’s number is still 287,000 higher than January.

A number of economists look past the “main” unemployment rate to a different figure the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls “U-6,” which it defines as “total unemployed, plus all marginally attached workers plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of all civilian labor force plus all marginally attached workers.”

In other words, the unemployed, the underemployed and the discouraged—a rate that still remains high.

The U-6 rate fellslightly in June to 12.1percent. While it is down 210 basis points over the last year, the trend has been somewhat more volatile than in the main unemployment rate, which steadily declined.

Reuters sticks with the top-line number for its headline, but on the live blog, wage stagnation catches their attention:

Average hourly earnings still aren’t rising by much. From the report: “Average hourly earnings for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls rose by 6 cents to$24.45, following a 6-cent increase in May. Over the past 12 months, averagehourly earnings have risen by 2.0 percent.”

Hourly earnings are important because Fed chair Janet Yellen has indicated she wants to see an increase before she really believes the employment situation is solid. Wage growth has been more or less stagnant since the end of the recession.

Binyamin Applebaum delivers the bottom line:

Bottom line: This labor market is much much weaker than the last time the unemployment rate stood at 6.1 percent.

Allow me to walk you through the math, using the only numbers I somewhat trust, the not-seasonally-adjusted numbers from June 2013 and June 2014:

– June 2013 –
– Civilian non-institutional population – 245,552,000
– Labor force – 157,089,000
– Employed – 144,841,000
– Unemployed (including only those who last looked for work between mid-May and mid-June) – 12,248,000
– Those not in the labor force but who want a job (this includes those who last looked for work prior to mid-June 2013 and thus are not part of the U-4, U-5 and U-6 statistics) – 7,152,000
– Total number of unemployed who want to work regardless of when they last looked for work – 19,400,000

Everything about the government has to be so complicated. Unemployment goes “down” and the amount of people dropping out of the work force goes up. I guess that’s just too nuanced for dunderheads like myself. Why not just assess how many people can work, and subtract how many ARE working? That would give a better idea on unemployment. I suppose that makes too much sense. All I know, is that If thousands of fans give up watching the Yankees, you won’t hear the owner bragging about it, the way Obama will crow about the “drop” in unemployment.

What is the current number of disabled? It is easy to get that unemployment number down when you pay people not to work and go on the dole through disability.

And all those part timers who want a full time job..if they are working 20-25 hours a week, then we can figure the number of jobs is significantly reduced. Obviously, if you take 1 40 hour job and split it with 2 20 hour part timers to avoid ObamaCare, bingo the unemployment number comes down twice as quickly.

Imagine that 20% of the unemployed people they *are* counting belonged in a category with a specific attribute. If the BLS decided to stop counting people in that category – even though they are still unemployed – the jobless rate would ‘improve’ dramatically. Nothing changed for the better, but the way the math is performed, the result LOOKS better. In fact, this is how to make things look better when they are actually getting worse (ie: jobless rate declines, though the number of unemployed people keeps increasing to new record highs).

Midas on July 3, 2014 at 9:50 AM

Nothing like hiding the decline in order to keep the scam going. Stagnant wages, depressed productivity, able-bodied workers unable to compete against illegals doing what Americans can’t/won’t do–work for less than living wages at at a given standard of living. IOW, American construction workers can’t live on $8 – $12/hr in a single family residence, whereas the illegal workers living 2 or 3 to a bedroom find the wages to be a princely sum.

Much like Wall Street hitting $17,000. Question: compare when DJ hit 14K in 2007 vs the last time it hit 14k (Feb 2013) and check your spending power. Gas @ $1.70 vs $3.20, or even a bushel of corn. The Govt has been hiding the inflation by dropping key items from CPI and we’re supposed to marvel that DJ hit 17K?

That 17K ain’t worth the 10k when that milestone was hit. More akin to the Reichbank celebrating that the baker’s profit and earning ratio had increased to 100,000 RM per stale bun where just last year, he was making 1 pf on each fresh schrippe.

i see obama’s approval’s up to 52 on gallup, up 9 points since a month ago. surely just a blip. lefty fox news showing his approval surging is clearly just propaganda.
there should be more blog posts on the WWII vets, it’s clearly working.
sesquipedalian on October 4, 2013 at 1:50 PM

Predshe’s a well known liar.
sesquipedalian on April 19, 2013 at 11:48 AM

Anybody know how many jobs were created in Illinois??? I thought they only had 900 jobs in the past year. Where I live the unemployment rate is high and the state is running in the red and has been since Obama has been in power. The state is Washington.

Americans get jobs, conservatives call the whammmmmbulance. where is your patriotism this eve of the 4th!?

The Velvet Mafia on July 3, 2014 at 11:50 AM

oops

A number of economists look past the “main” unemployment rate to a different figure the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls “U-6,” which it defines as “total unemployed, plus all marginally attached workers plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of all civilian labor force plus all marginally attached workers.”

In other words, the unemployed, the underemployed and the discouraged—a rate that still remains high.

The U-6 rate fell slightly in June to 12.1 percent. While it is down 210 basis points over the last year, the trend has been somewhat more volatile than in the main unemployment rate, which steadily declined.

Bottom line: This labor market is much much weaker than the last time the unemployment rate stood at 6.1 percent.

For the 49th time in 50 months, more jobseekers gave up looking than found work.

Poor little racefan, maybe you should have someone who can read..explain these things to you.

THE UNEMPLOYMENT NUMBERS ARE COMPLETELY PHONY!!! Obamacrats simply don’t count unemployed people who have been deemed to have quit participating in the labor force. Just because some people have been out of work for a long time, this condition does NOT solve the unemployment problem – it only misreports it and perpetrates a LIE!!

The “number of jobs created” is WAY BELOW the required replacement level!!! So there are no new jobs for new entries into the workforce: so there is no way the REAL unemployment rate (which is well into double-digits) can come down with this miserable performance.

i see obama’s approval’s up to 52 on gallup, up 9 points since a month ago. surely just a blip. lefty fox news showing his approval surging is clearly just propaganda. there should be more blog posts on the WWII vets, it’s clearly working.

The real issue is the have states vs the not have states. Here in Texas we are having record job growth, whereas high tax and regulation states are seeing job contraction. Fortunately for the country there are more jobs being created in states like Texas than being lost in, as an example, Illinois.

If reducing regulations was the key to lower unemployment, then states like Tennessee, Georgia, and Mississippi would be doing a lot better than they are. And states like Hawaii, Vermont, and Minnesota certainly wouldn’t be doing better than Texas.

Americans get jobs, conservatives call the whammmmmbulance. where is your patriotism this eve of the 4th!?

The Velvet Mafia on July 3, 2014 at 11:50 AM

We are consistently making jobs at half the rate we ought to be to keep up with our population increase, and we are now counting half-time jobs as full time ones to fudge the numbers.

The Ben Casellman chart says it all. Imagine a river of unemployed people (the “100%” of that chart — the people who wanted work and looked for it), and you see that, say, 17% find a job. So, what we have is that 73% aren’t finding a job — they are not being cleared off the rolls in any meaningful way. Then we find that, say, 22% have decided they aren’t going to look for work. Where do those 22% go? The answer is that they fall off the unemployment rolls (are diverted from the river), decreasing the number of unemployed, and they also get subtracted from the labor participation rate. When they are subtracted from the number of unemployed, they do not participate in the next time slice of the algorithm (which is a discrete, not continuous, algorithm). A better algorithm would sum the number of unemployed with those who were unemployed but chose to drop out of the labor force for the previous iteration to find a real “Americans who want to work but can’t” number. But that’s not how it’s done by Obama, because that number would look too crappy.

Now, what does the 4th of July have to do with anything, other than being one of those Alinsky things liberals throw in as red herrings? I’m now supposed to put up my Flag and to force myself to think good thoughts about unemployment which are not backed by fact?

Oh please. That unemployment number is at best misleading and at worst bogus. Obviously it doesn’t matter that the IRS is attacking its own citizens; Bengazi is still in a cover up; radical Muslims are overrunning the Middle East and Obamacare continues its phony, destructive course. You need to sort through the rubble and try to find something more convincing.

Unemployment “numbers” will continue to fall so long as people leave the workforce and give up looking for jobs, which anyone involved in the real world knows is still happening at alarming levels. These numbers really don’t tell the story.

Add in the need to make up lost ground, and we’re at around 18 million jobs over the next five years — or 300,000 a month.

So that’s a useful benchmark. Even if we add 300,000 jobs a month, we’re looking at a prolonged period of suffering — a huge cost from the Great Recession. So that’s kind of a minimal definition of success. Anything less than that, and it’s bad news.

a) See above.
b) The DOW is the tool of the 1% according to your side. The fact that the DOW is doing so well while unemployment isn’t is interesting, is it not? In fact, the DOW was doing well with 11% unemployment, so there we are. Our economy was doing great, according to the DOW, with 11% unemployment. And you think a little head jiggle is supposed to make me happy?
c) Your average Communist at least has principle, even if it’s misguided. I think this President has no principle, no character, at all. Our Government is being run like Chicago’s city government, with pay to play and the use of the instruments of that Government to reward friends and to punish enemies. If I were to be charitable and call him a communist, it would be to call him a member of the oligarchic class which traditionally arises in communistic societies — the guys who do no work, act like they do, but tell all the others who are working what they ought to do to feed the oligarchs, who are the leaders in building communism.

For you rich Gringo’s living in houses stolen from the Native peoples of this Continent.

NEWS HEADLINE—-Big American businessmen today said they believe if we only could import more “workers” from outside the U.S. that everyone would have a job.

They reportedly have found a source of new workers and they are sure they are willing to do the work that regular Americans are not willing to do.

Of course, this headline is from 1780 and it’s talking about importing workers from West Africa (then called slaves). They were going to be used in the cotton fields in the South because we needed to grow the industry and we didn’t have enough regular Americans to do the jobs.

to compare to the last president, that president only had 1.1 Million Jobs created over their full 8 years.

Gebeaux on July 3, 2014 at 9:40 AM

Nice post…..clearly a post that should be Institutionalized…

You state Obama has created 5.15 Million. Funny thing is you
forgot to SUBTRACT the total number of jobs lost.

I know, I know, MATH is not for everyone….then you claim
that “likely, he will have created close to 12 million jobs
by the end of his Presidency”….watch that canyon you just
leaped over friend…your face just crash landed into Obama’s
ball s*ck.

BTW, the last President, who created only 1.1 million jobs.

His numbers had the total number of JOBS LOST factored in.

I know, I know, applying the same standards is not for
everyone either….

We need about 545,551 jobs per month in order to MAINTAIN our unemployment rate without reducing the Labor Force Participation Rate.

Note to Ed: You shouldn’t use Administration Talking Point headlines on this subject!!!

landlines on July 3, 2014 at 12:11 PM

A bit of a clarification on that from your source, starting at August 2012 (emphasis in the original):

If we take the labor participation rate at the start of the great recession, 66%, we get a whole other number of jobs needed each month to keep up with population growth. If we keep the same rate of unemployment, 8.1%, we would need 545,551 jobs per month and it would take an entire year to get to the same August rate of unemployment, 8.1%.

This is because by increasing the labor participation rate 2.5%, we took 6,089,150 people not counted and added them to the labor force statistics and of course, they would enter in as unemployed. The unemployment rate is the ratio of those in the civilian labor force who do not have a job against those who who do.

We can also estimate the number of jobs needed each month, just to maintain, by rough numbers. If we assume a smoothed noninstitutional civilian population growth rate of 0.076% per month, then next month’s population growth would be 185,617 additional people ages 16 and over and not locked up somewhere. If we then assume the labor participation rate of this new growth would be 68.0% and not the actual, artificially low 63.5%, we would get an additional 126,920 jobs needed to keep up with this population growth.

That 546K/month “job growth” (in reality, an increase in employment from the household number and not a job increase in the establishment report) every month for a year is what was necessary between September 2012 and August 2013 to net a 8.1% unemployment rate with a 66% LFPR.

Unfortunately, that 66% LFPR (66.1% seasonally adjusted in June 2008) is unrealistic because of the aging population. What is a realistic LFPR sans the negative effects of the Obama-era economy is in the mid-to-high 64% range (a seasonally-adjusted 64.5%-64.6% (depending on rounding for June 2014).

The U-6 number is the only one you need to look at, at that’s 12.1% Unemployment.

U-6 is the TRUE unemployment number. The one that reports 6.1% is complete fantasy, and is nothing but a propaganda point.

Meople on July 3, 2014 at 12:47 PM

Minor point of order – U-6 is the combined unemployment/underemployment number, as it throws in those who work fewer than 35 hours at their various jobs due to “economic conditions” (as defined by the BLS) who want to work at least 35 hours. U-5, while closer to a pure total unemployment percentage, excludes those who want to work but last looked more than a year prior to the survey (plus it uses seasonally-unadjusted numbers).

A long time ago, I noticed that the total number of those who want to work but hadn’t looked in the 4 weeks prior to the survey has been mentioned since 1994, and it comes in seasonally-adjusted and not-seasonally-adjusted flavors. This month, it came in at 6,694,000 not-adjusted/6,115,000 adjusted, much higher than the U-5 “marginally attached” 2,028,000.

Including those who want to work but last looked more than a year ago would push the total unemployment rate to 10.1% not-seasonally-adjusted/9.6% seasonally adjusted. That’s quite a bit higher than the U-5’s 7.5% unseasoned/7.3% seasoned.

The news gets worse if you want to add the underemployed to that. Instead of the official U-6 12.4% unseasoned/12.1% seasoned, you’d get 15.0% unseasoned/14.4% seasoned unemployment+underemployment rate.

I’ve long since exhausted by unemployment benefit, consequence, am now placed in the “No longer looking” catagory, even though that could not be further from the truth.

Let me explain something to you. The LIV (Low information voter) crowd ignore the Republicans because they hear the hyper charged hyperbolic rhetoric which clearly and indisputably defies even the simplest of common logic.

If the Democrat and Obama are genuinely destroying the economy as the Republicans claim (-2.9% growth???) Then why do the Republicans insist that the decrease in the labor force participation rate is due to people not wanting to work? When you make this claim, what you are telling the LIV is, the economy isn’t actually bad, there is work if you want to work. People just don’t want to work.

Low Information Voter do not mean No Intelligence Voter, in most cases, it simply means, Disgusted voter. What they hear, and recognize are hyper partisan attacks which contradict the very assertions they are predicated on.

Either the economy is actually contracting, which means that employment opportunities diminish and the unemployment rate increases, you do not have a contracting economy and simultaneously a expanding workforce, the two are actually logically and mathematically mutually exclusive.

Or you do not have a contracting economy and a decreasing unemployment rate.

The Real Unemployment Rate: In 20% Of American Families, Everyone Is Unemployed
Tyler Durden’s picture
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 04/29/2014 20:06 -0400

Submitted by Michael Snyder of The American Dream blog,

According to shocking new numbers that were just released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 20 percent of American families do not have a single person that is working. So when someone tries to tell you that the unemployment rate in the United States is about 7 percent, you should just laugh. One-fifth of the families in the entire country do not have a single member with a job. That is absolutely astonishing. How can a family survive if nobody is making any money? Well, the answer to that question is actually quite easy. There is a reason why government dependence has reached epidemic levels in the United States. Without enough jobs, tens of millions of additional Americans have been forced to reach out to the government for help. At this point, if you can believe it, the number of Americans getting money or benefits from the federal government each month exceeds the number of full-time workers in the private sector by more than 60 million.

When I was growing up, it seemed like anyone that was willing to work hard could find a good paying job. But now that has all changed. At this point, 20 percent of all the families in the entire country do not have a single member that has a job. That includes fathers, mothers and children. The following is how CNSNews.com broke down the numbers…

A family, as defined by the BLS, is a group of two or more people who live together and who are related by birth, adoption or marriage. In 2013, there were 80,445,000 families in the United States and in 16,127,000—or 20 percent–no one had a job.

To be honest, these really are Great Depression-type numbers. But over the years “unemployment” has been redefined so many times that it doesn’t mean the same thing that it once did. The government tells us that the official unemployment rate is about 7 percent, but that number is almost meaningless at this point.

A number that I find much more useful is the employment-population ratio. According to the employment-population ratio, the percentage of working age Americans that actually have a job has been below 59 percent for more than four years in a row…

Employment Population Ratio 2014

That means that more than 41 percent of all working age Americans do not have a job.

When people can’t take care of themselves, it becomes necessary for the government to take care of them. And what we have seen in recent years is government dependence soar to unprecedented levels. In fact, welfare spending and entitlement payments now make up 69 percent of the entire federal budget. For much more on this, please see my previous article entitled “18 Stats That Prove That Government Dependence Has Reached Epidemic Levels“.

And what is even more frightening is that more families are falling out of the middle class every single day. As a recent CNN article explained, approximately one-third of all U.S. households are living “hand-to-mouth”. In other words, they are constantly living on the edge of financial disaster…

About one-third of American households live “hand-to-mouth,” meaning that they spend all their paychecks. But what surprised the study authors is that 66% of these families are middle class, with a median income of $41,000. While they don’t have liquid assets, such as savings accounts or mutual fund holdings, they do have homes and retirement accounts, with a median net worth of $41,000.

“We don’t expect them to be living paycheck to paycheck,” said Greg Kaplan, study co-author and assistant professor of economics at Princeton University.

In short, it’s your assertion that the ranks of unwilling to work are growing that I am calling bullshit on. It isn’t that they are unwilling, or do not want to work, it isn’t even that they have become discouraged and quit looking.

It is that the economy really is that bad and their isn’t anyone willing to hire people who have been unemployed for more than 6 months. Reach the age of 45, and combine that with being long term unemployed, and your odds of finding employment regardless of how diligently you search decrease dramatically.

There are 4 plus million Americans in this catagory, they are your so called “Do not want to work” people. Yea, I do call bullshit.

Minor point of order – U-6 is the combined unemployment/underemployment number, as it throws in those who work fewer than 35 hours at their various jobs due to “economic conditions” (as defined by the BLS) who want to work at least 35 hours. U-5, while closer to a pure total unemployment percentage, excludes those who want to work but last looked more than a year prior to the survey (plus it uses seasonally-unadjusted numbers).

A long time ago, I noticed that the total number of those who want to work but hadn’t looked in the 4 weeks prior to the survey has been mentioned since 1994, and it comes in seasonally-adjusted and not-seasonally-adjusted flavors. This month, it came in at 6,694,000 not-adjusted/6,115,000 adjusted, much higher than the U-5 “marginally attached” 2,028,000.

Including those who want to work but last looked more than a year ago would push the total unemployment rate to 10.1% not-seasonally-adjusted/9.6% seasonally adjusted. That’s quite a bit higher than the U-5′s 7.5% unseasoned/7.3% seasoned.

The news gets worse if you want to add the underemployed to that. Instead of the official U-6 12.4% unseasoned/12.1% seasoned, you’d get 15.0% unseasoned/14.4% seasoned unemployment+underemployment rate.

Steve Eggleston on July 3, 2014 at 1:03 PM

Nice, appreciate the extra information. And that’s what I was wondering too, which were the numbers around the underemployed.

Given that a large number of the jobs added were only part time jobs, it makes sense to add those numbers in.

I think the bottom line here, at least at this moment in time, is that the Regime can try to claim all they want, that the economy is improving. But people like me look around at what’s actually going on around them, and we can see that’s just not the reality right now.

Better go run to the threads where you can keep cheering on Putin and ISIS, instead of having to wallow in this good news for America,

everdiso on July 3, 2014 at 1:26 PM

Guess you didn’t bother reading the prior comments. 3 of your fellow butt-sniffers said practically the same thing upthread. That dizziness you feel isn’t from spin, it’s that Obboie’s spin has long stopped but your heads are still spinning.

The one thing that defies physics are liberal minds. Normally the greater the mass, the greater the inertia to keep spinning. So there must be some mysterious dark matter that keeps going because it ain’t your lightweight brain.

I’m blunt, and yes harsh, because I don’t much care about the politics. I care more about the wakeup call, even if it offends delicate ears/eyes, hoping against hope that it isn’t too late to avoid the tipping point of there being more Moochers than Makers.

The problem is you’re in a shrinking portion of the long-term jobless who still want to work, even if the BLS only counts you in the “last looked more than a year” category and thus not worthy of being a part of any unemployment measure. The number of those who “subsist” on means-tested welfare (which explicitly excludes both Social Security Old Age/Survivors benefits and Social Security Disability benefits) is increasing at record rates, even in the middle of a “strong recovery”. In fact, SSDI is also increasing at record rates even as that is due to be cut substantially in 2 years because it will have burned out its “trust fund”.

I wish I could see any signficiant evidence that the cratering LFPR is due to families choosing to live on one source of income without welfare, but that doesn’t exist. Instead, as mentioned, there’s plenty of evidence, including Obama’s elimination of work/work-search requirements for food stamps, that the welfare-by-choice class is growing by leaps and bounds.

That missive from ZeroHedge merely is evidence that bleak jobs market where less than 60% of the entire population and barely 80% of the potential prime workforce works even though living is too expensive to have a 1-worker/2-adult household is the “New Normal”. Of note, the last time so few of the potential workforce/potential prime workforce were working was when that 1-worker/2-adult household was the standard. One of the rational responses to that is to join the welfare-by-choice class, and that’s happening at an unsustainable rate.

Just because you’re the exception to the rule doesn’t mean the rule exists and applies to the majority.

Slight correction to the above as I read off the LFRP chart for the 25-54 age group instead of the employment-population chart

That missive from ZeroHedge merely is evidence that bleak jobs market where less than 60% of the entire population and barely 80%75% of the potential prime workforce works even though living is too expensive to have a 1-worker/2-adult household is the “New Normal”. Of note, the last time so few of the potential workforce/potential prime workforce were working was when that 1-worker/2-adult household was the standard. One of the rational responses to that is to join the welfare-by-choice class, and that’s happening at an unsustainable rate.

Actually, the revisions are usually upward. note that 24,000 jobs were added to the two last months job reports.

Gebeaux on July 3, 2014 at 9:42 AM

Out of curiosity, where are you getting these numbers? I visited the link you supplied, and I only saw this when I searched for “revise”:

The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for May was revised from +195,000 to +176,000, and
the change for June was revised from +195,000 to +188,000. With these revisions, employment gains
in May and June combined were 26,000 less than previously reported.

You failed to learn from your own example. First of all, 1780 is many years after the second class noncitizenship of slavery had been made part of our laws. Had there been legal immigration of West Africans, the Civil War would not have happened.

The fix for this creation of an underclass was every bit as painful as the laws which created it, and yet justice was, in the end, done.

Looking at the results of the importation of the “illegals” so many years ago, what should be done for this latest batch? As you point out, they are brought here to do the work that “regular Americans” won’t do, and so how do you reward them for having done that work?

My grandfather was brought here from Sicily as a young teenager to work in the coal mines of Pennsylvania — to do that which “regular Americans” wouldn’t do. How did this country treat him? At least they grudgingly allowed him his citizenship, and all five of his sons served in the Army in WWII. But every minority here — the Italians, the Irish, the Poles, the Jews, the blacks — they remember what was good about the United States and certainly what was bad.

And the worst of the bad is the anti-immigration stance being taken by many now. They use new laws not in place when their forebears immigrated and an over-developed sense of legality to claim that these people should never have come in the first place.

As everyone knows, there’s a vast difference between legislation signed into law vice what is right and moral. Plenty of Americans have died attempting to delineate that distinction.

Before December, the last time the labor force participation rate sank as low as 62.8 percent was in February 1978, when it was also 62.8 percent. At that time, Jimmy Carter was president.

06-26-14 Using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, CIS scholars Steven A. Camarota and Karen Zeigler found that there were 127,000 fewer working-age natives holding a job in the first quarter of 2014 than in 2000, while the number of immigrants with a job was 5.7 million above the 2000 level.

As far as the ‘involuntary part time’, most people I know who are trapped in part time cannot work two jobs because the new standard is part time open availability. They cannot lock in a work shift to allow two jobs. So part time today is more a form of slavery.

There is nothing solid in those numbers.
Try to reconcile this WSJ piece, Jul 3, 2014

In June, all levels of government added a seasonally adjusted 26,000 employees. That gain outpaced the manufacturing and construction sectors — combined.

Public-sector employment grew by 54,000 so far this year. While that’s a modest fraction of the 1.4 million workers added to payrolls in 2014, it comes after five straight years of shrinking in the government workforce.

say what? 1.4 million added in 2014?

Government workers tend to be paid better than those in the fast-growing fields of retail and food service, and they typically receive health and retirement benefits. Well-compensated workers could support stronger spending and faster economic growth.

the fast growing fields of retail and food service?

From what I see, there is a determined effort to misrepresent the job famine in the US in order to justify open borders.

As someone about to drop out of the labor force allow me to explain that it is not voluntary. I merely am about to run out of benefits and not having found meaningful full time employment will no longer be a member of the labor force. I remember when part time jobs weren’t counted in the monthly employment numbers too. Things may be picking up but you couldn’t prove it by me!

Does anyone at HA know how many of the jobs created were part time jobs? How many full time jobs ?

alanstern on July 3, 2014 at 12:57 PM

Part-time jobs accounted for two-thirds of all new jobs in June 2014. So, baically 3 % of the adult population are working part-time because they cannot find full-time jobs. This is far above the pre-recession figures: in December 2007 the level of part time workers was at about 1.8 %.

Does anyone at HA know how many of the jobs created were part time jobs? How many full time jobs ?

alanstern on July 3, 2014 at 12:57 PM

The jobs report headline number — hereafter referred to as “smoke and mirrors” — that was heralded by the usual suspects in the financial press, misses a fatal crack in the foundation: the reason the economy added 288,000 jobs in June is because part-time jobs grew by 799,000, while full-time jobs fell by 523,000.